HST110H | MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Blog 10-Greek Street

I chose a book published by Vertigo for this week called Greek Street. By briefly flipping through the pages in the store, I noticed some racier pages that I have not noticed in other comic books and thought it would be interesting to see this publishers take on graphics and storytelling, specifically with this book.

The first page begins with an African-American female with dread locks and tribal tattoos along her arm naked holding an article of lingerie. She spoke to the reader as she got dressed into this stripper looking get-up. She told of what was going on in the story line; on the following page it was a different setting with different characters. I believe she may be the narrator of the story, giving history and information; I believe this can be helpful to the reader, especially for a continuing series such as this one; however, I am confused as to the need of the narrator being a naked stripper. I feel like this may have been thrown in there to draw reader’s attention to the book; I can say that these pages are what made me think this book would be different than the rest.

Turns out, the book is a pretty basic story of bad guys and good guys and someone doing something wrong causing someone else to be after them. As the characters are being followed throughout the book, three girls are introduced and followed by one of the male characters. They end up in a strip club for one page and then it moves to another character. I think that there is no reason for these girls to be stripping in terms of the story; it has nothing to do with what else is going on and it appears to me that it was just one way to get something risqué in the book, such as naked, beautiful girls, that will draw attention to curious readers and also to many young boys. Pornography and nude pictures are not available in printed form to minors and I think this is one way that young boys can get their hands on such a thing and still have a wild imagination of the opposite sex. I think this book is somewhat discriminating to the female gender because the girls had no real roll (at least not in this issue), and whenever they appeared, they were barely, if at all, clothed. I do not think it is appropriate for the story, but I think it is one additional way to draw in curious new readers. It really can be interesting what ideas are created when looking to expand in the market. It was a decent comic minus the few random strippers.